Knowing the GROW Model versus actually coaching!

In all of our coaching programs we ask participants to go back and just ask the basic ‘four top coaching questions’ to really practice the GROW Model:

What is it you want to achieve? (Or what is your goal?)

What’s happening now?

What are your options?

What will you do to move forward? And by When?

One of the main reasons we do this is because Sir John Whitmore himself told me, ‘just because managers KNOW the GROW Model, doesn’t make them a coach’.

And this is actually really common – we meet a lot of people who know of the GROW Model, have heard of the GROW Model and may have even been exposed to the questions on another program, but they are clearly not coaching.

They are not using the GROW Model questions as part of their normal conversations.

When a person comes to get help, these managers can’t wait for them to stop talking, so that they can jump in and solve the problem, make a suggestion or tell them quickly what to do. ‘I don’t have time for coaching!’ is the normal defence that they give me or ‘coaching takes too much time’.

So putting those two responses to the side (we will cover that in another article), we never apologise for asking managers to go back and practice asking the four top GROW Model questions until it feels really natural.

And that’s the key word – natural. Because when those questions start to feel natural that’s when we start to hear coaching questions being included in every-day conversations and that is the start of a coaching culture within the team, department or organisation. You only have to look at the case studies in Bring Out Their Best, to see how whole organisations have built a culture of coaching and it all starts with managers putting the questions into practice, rather than just knowing the theory!